Sixteen must-see exhibitions in South Florida during Miami Art Week – The Art Newspaper

Joyce PensatoInstitute of Modern Artwork Miami, 2 December-15 March 2026The painter Joyce Pensato (1941-2019) made her title by means of a daring fusion: rendering the kind of mass-media imagery related to Pop artwork and appropriation artwork in gestural charcoal traces and brushstrokes evocative of Neo-Expressionism. This exhibition, essentially the most complete museum survey dedicated to her work but, spans the Seventies to the 2010s. It brings collectively, amongst different our bodies of labor, a sampling of her early Batman drawings, a number of her many, many renderings of Mickey Mouse and an set up of her excessive close-ups on well-known characters’ eyes, together with protagonists from South Park and the youngsters’s-programme dinosaur Barney.

“They need to have one thing deeper that I connect with,” Pensato mentioned of how she selects characters to color, in a 2014 interview with Artwork Papers. “If I connect with it, I do know the viewer can also be connecting to one thing as nicely. I haven’t analysed it too deeply, however I feel I’m connecting to everybody’s internal self—to their childhood. I do know I’m simply having enjoyable, however I’m coping with the American icon. They need to be greater than Mickey Mouse with a lobotomy.” Benjamin Sutton

Mulheres: Proposals from BrazilArtNexus Area, 3 December-24 April 2026The 50 artists featured on this exhibition hint a lineage by means of Brazil’s Fashionable and modern artwork, from Lygia Clark’s geometric rigour and Anna Bella Geiger’s conceptual irony to Adriana Varejão’s stunning and wounded painted our bodies and Rosana Paulino’s acts of restore. Their works confront patriarchy and colonial legacies, flip embroidery and clay into dissent, and reclaim supplies as soon as dismissed as craft.

“The place most girls artists have been underestimated or ignored, a major variety of Brazilian girls have distinguished themselves and even outlined new creative canons,” says Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig, the exhibition’s curator. Mulheres brings collectively generations of ladies whose practices echo throughout time, artists turning the supplies of every day life into instruments of resistance and sweetness. Of their fingers, Brazil’s historical past unfolds not as a single narrative however as a subject of gestures, every one increasing what artwork and authorship can imply. Carmen F. de Terenzio

Jack Pierson: The Miami YearsThe Bass, till 16 August 2026Jack Pierson’s slick photographic work and sculptural assemblages take centre stage on this exhibition, the primary to look at South Florida’s influence on his follow. His work has traditionally melded the formal language of promoting with a punk sensibility to inform dynamic, unfiltered tales about queer embodiment. Pierson’s pictures, sculpture, book-making and set up work seize a classy intimacy together with his topics, positioning his muses as compositional vectors for loneliness and wanderlust. His first six-month keep in Miami Seaside within the winter of 1984 set the stage for his creative explorations of the town’s queer neighborhood, visually defining its seedy glamour and untrammelled want. A brand new set up commissioned by the Bass, ARRAY (MIAMI), combines ephemeral printed supplies with the artist’s personal output, making a residing, respiratory totem to Miami Seaside’s metropolitan power. Torey Akers

Lawrence Lek: NOX PavilionThe Bass, till 26 April 2026Over the final decade, the London-based multimedia artist and film-maker Lawrence Lek has developed a cinematic universe that challenges the notion of immersive expertise as mindless spectacle, changing it with a important inquiry into the posthuman situation. Again in 2023, he launched audiences to the fictional world of NOX (quick for “Nonhuman Excellence”), the place self-driving automobiles are rehabilitated at a centre for non-compliant machines.

“With NOX Pavilion on the Bass, I used to be reflecting on the world of Miami Seaside, not actually, however as a liminal setting on the sting of Florida,” Lek says. “The construction of a half-built pavilion is current in each the bodily exhibition house and in a brand new video commissioned for an LED wall, the place a crash take a look at dummy promotes the [artificial intelligence] mum or dad firm’s pursuits. I consider the pavilion as the final word functionless archetype—a construction that exists as an icon and as a framework that additionally displays Miami Seaside’s vernacular model.” Alex Estorick

MOSAICO: Italian Code of a Timeless ArtPatricia and Phillip Frost Artwork Museum, till 22 February 2026Fragments of a mosaic ground that when adorned a ship belonging to Caligula, the tyrannical Roman emperor, have landed in Miami. The Frost Museum at Florida Worldwide College (FIU) is presenting the restored artefact together with Eleventh-century mosaic stone slabs. All are on view in the USA for the primary time, because of loans from the world’s oldest museum, the Capitoline in Rome. The exhibition unites these items with digital representations of main Italian mosaics that immerse viewers in intricate histories of smash and restore.

Guests advance from these works into an exhibition structure organised by area. Six sections element architectural standouts, a few of them Unesco World Heritage websites, from Sicily to Aquileia, west of Italy’s Slovenian border. Immersive digital projections by Magister Artwork carry viewers into the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, the place mosaics depict starry blue skies, floral designs and an elaborate composition of Jesus because the Good Shepherd, amongst his sheep. Different projections transport guests to an expensive residence in Pompeii and to the Basilica of St Vitale, consecrated in AD547. “You’ll be able to’t at all times journey to Italy and entry these archaeological websites,” says Miriam Machado, the Frost’s interim director. “Now we have artefacts that you would be able to expertise. It’s a convention that’s related at the moment… digital applied sciences improve the power to have interaction and study.” A. Cerisse Cohen

Richard Hunt: PressureInstitute of Modern Artwork Miami, 2 December-29 March 2026The largest survey to this point dedicated to the American sculptor Richard Hunt (1935-2023), Strain focuses on his bold, material-forward follow between 1955 and 1989. A formative motion for the younger artist—who taught himself welding whereas learning on the Faculty of the Artwork Institute of Chicago within the mid-Nineteen Fifties—got here when he encountered the welded sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio González within the Artwork Institute of Chicago’s 1953 exhibition Sculpture of the twentieth Century. The ICA present begins with Telescopic Building (1955), which Hunt created two years later in an evident try and weld the invisible.

Hunt created the present’s second-oldest sculpture, Hero’s Head (1956), after attending Emmett Until’s open-casket funeral, which had a transformative influence on the 20-year-old artist. At slightly below ten inches, the welded metal bust of Until’s disfigured head foreshadowed a follow that developed on the crossroads of the Civil Rights motion and daring experiments on the boundary between figuration and abstraction. “Richard made these negotiations between formal innovation and social consciousness and he by no means went literal,” says Gean Moreno, the exhibition’s co-curator (with Alex Gartenfeld) and the director of the ICA’s artwork and analysis centre. Osman Can Yerebakan

Tara Lengthy: La EsquinitaLocust Tasks, till 17 January 2026Tara Lengthy’s new set up La Esquinita (Little Nook) has taken over all three areas at Locust Tasks in addition to the constructing’s exterior, remodeling the gallery into a store for sweets and souvenirs—with greater than 500 miniature sculptures on the market. The immersive surroundings, marking Lengthy’s first main solo present, unfolds in three acts: seduction, publicity and collapse. Every act gestures in direction of cycles of extraction and survival in Lengthy’s hometown of Miami. On the exhibition’s centre stands a crumbling frosted cake the scale of a room, each a spectacle and a warning.

“La Esquinita is a type of little nook spots, a bodega, that are in every single place in Miami,” Lengthy says. “It turned a technique to speak concerning the metropolis’s cycle: folks arriving, nature being ripped up, others being pushed out. That construction—seduction, publicity, collapse—is the construction of Miami itself. I needed to construct an area that seduces you within the entrance and asks more durable questions within the again.” C.F.T.

Petah Coyne: How A lot A Coronary heart Can HoldLowe Artwork Museum, till 14 March 2026The American sculptor Petah Coyne’s revolutionary, emotive creations provide a materially lush rumination on girls’s marginalised creative legacies. The exhibition is split into three non-chronological sections—Girls’s Work, Girls’s Relationships and Girls Obscured & Reworked—every interlocking with the following in maximalist waves of agglomerated texture. Greatest identified for gnarled, twinkling objects that dangle in house like haunted chandeliers, Coyne’s work braids fable and expertise collectively in ghostly concordance. Initially organised by the Chazen Museum of Artwork at College of Wisconsin-Madison, the exhibition borrows its title from a poignant Zelda Fitzgerald quote: “No person has ever measured, even the poets, how a lot a coronary heart can maintain.” In Coyne’s interpretation, it turns into a visually potent lament for the buried historic contributions of ladies to the humanities. T.A.

Kat Lyons: Full EarthMarquez Artwork Tasks, ongoingOne hour’s drive from the air-conditioned Miami Seaside Conference Heart lies Everglades Nationwide Park, an enormous protected ecosystem of 6,105 sq. km—roughly the scale of Devon in south-west England. These two worlds collide in Kat Lyons’s Full Earth at Marquez Artwork Tasks (MAP) in Miami Seaside, the Kentucky-born painter’s first US institutional solo present. Lyons makes use of the Everglades’ previous and current as scaffolding for large-scale oil work that unfold as half Leonora Carrington, half John James Audubon and half Frans Snyders.

Lyons’s relationship to the wetland is each private and literary. “There’s a sense of playfulness, secrecy and mysticism that I attribute to the Everglades,” she tells The Artwork Newspaper. Members of her associate’s prolonged household are Gladespeople, a free time period for many who dwell in and across the ecosystem. Moreover, the conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s Everglades: River of Grass (1947) capabilities as a lodestar for Lyons, whose canvases equally hover between the wonder and the warning in Douglas’s elegiac writings. J. Cabelle Ahn

Diana Eusebio: Discipline of DreamsMuseum of Modern Artwork North Miami, till 16 March 2026Diana Eusebio’s first solo museum exhibition is a homecoming in some ways. The award-winning Peruvian Dominican artist grew up within the metropolis, and her work is steeped within the Miami neighborhood and its pure surroundings. The exhibition options greater than 30 works, new and outdated, rooted in Eusebio’s distinctive follow of mixing textiles hand-coloured with pure dyes—drawing on her African and Indigenous heritage—with digital prints. Fusing modern artwork with ancestral traditions, Eusebio’s work explores the layered questions of id, migration and the that means of dwelling.

“The title Discipline of Desires performs on the title of the movie about baseball (my brother performed for the Seattle Mariners) but additionally the dreamers preventing for his or her rights and citizenship,” Eusebio says. “I’m a first-generation American in Miami, and it’s a important time to have discussions across the genuine illustration of immigrants.” Hadani Ditmars

Hiba Schahbaz: The GardenMuseum of Modern Artwork North Miami, till 16 March 2026The first giant retrospective dedicated to the Karachi-born, Brooklyn-based artist Hiba Schahbaz spans 15 years of the artist’s follow, together with loans from non-public collections, work from her studio and newly commissioned items. Curated by Jasmine Wahi, it’s anchored by the thought of the jannat, or the Paradise Backyard, a motif rooted in Islamic custom and Sufi poetry.

Over time, Schahbaz’s follow has developed from small codecs to a lot bigger works. This shift in scale occurred throughout a interval of bodily restoration, when she might now not stand for lengthy stretches to work. To proceed portray, she started piecing collectively a number of small sheets into bigger surfaces, utilizing sturdier paper. This sensible adaptation allowed her to scale up.

Among the many works commissioned for the present is a 45ft-by-13ft mermaid mural, which Schahbaz described as a labour of affection. The 13 mermaids within the mural “are supposed to be ephemeral and transient, current on this second. The paper cutouts took as much as 14 days to put in. I started making these only for my studio and so they have by no means been on the market. They convey me pleasure and my hope is that they elevate anybody experiencing them.” Veronica Pesantes

Artwork and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from The Leiden CollectionNorton Museum of Artwork, till 29 March 2026The collector Thomas S. Kaplan is self-professedly evangelical about Rembrandt. Over the previous 20 years, he and his spouse, Daphne Recanati Kaplan, have constructed the Leiden Assortment, one of many world’s largest non-public holdings of Seventeenth-century Dutch artwork, which now totals greater than 220 works. Round a 3rd of these are featured in Artwork and Life in Rembrandt’s Time: Masterpieces from The Leiden Assortment, which marks the gathering’s first main US presentation. Among the many Previous Grasp treasures that made the journey to South Florida are style scenes by Gerrit Dou, Jan Steen and Pieter van Laer, all 17 Rembrandts within the assortment and the one Vermeer portray nonetheless in non-public fingers, Younger Girl seated at a Virginal (round 1670-75).

“I fell in love with historical historical past and antiquities once I was ten; by the point I used to be 14, I informed my dad and mom I used to be going to Oxford to review historical past,” Leiden tells The Artwork Newspaper. “I used to be residing in Florida once I declared I used to be going to review historical past in Europe, so it looks like a homecoming, whereas giving one thing again to the state in a method I by no means would have anticipated.” J.C.A.

Mark Dion: The South Florida Wildlife Rescue UnitPérez Artwork Museum Miami, till 1 February 2026Originally commissioned in 2006 by what was then the Miami Artwork Museum (now the Pérez Artwork Museum Miami), Mark Dion’s fictional however exactingly rendered South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit: Cell Laboratory (2006) depicts a conservation workforce and their customised truck geared up to rescue endangered species within the Everglades. A singular (and uniquely fragile) ecosystem, the Everglades are maybe much more acutely in want of simply such a wildlife-rescue unit than they have been 20 years in the past.

“Nature has this unbelievable resilience, and if we give it a break it truly can recuperate, however that simply shouldn’t be the way in which issues are transferring proper now,” Dion informed the Brooklyn Rail in a 2019 interview. “A lot injury has been carried out with reference to local weather change, we’re on the level the place we all know we can’t reverse world warming, solely mitigate the consequences and halt the tempo of change.” B.S.

Woody De Othello: coming forth by dayPérez Artwork Museum Miami, till 28 June 2026For the Miami-born artist Woody De Othello, objects carry loads of that means. Now primarily based in Oakland, California, Othello has typically tried to animate the inanimate, fashioning ceramics that breathe life into on a regular basis objects. The Haitian American artist has additional developed this theme in his first solo museum exhibition in his hometown. Titled after the Egyptian Ebook of the Useless, coming forth by day attracts on Othello’s in depth research of formality objects and spirituality all through the African diaspora, connecting the artist’s work to ancestral beliefs.

“I’m a first-generation American,” Othello says. “Each my dad and mom are Haitian immigrants. That basically formed my expertise in Miami. Rising up right here, residing right here—it is multicultural and layered, within the sense that there are such a lot of totally different aspects and pockets of Blackness.” Douglas Markowitz

Susanne Schirato: HeadwindVizcaya Museum and Gardens, till 18 Could 2026The Brazil-born, Miami-based artist Susanne Schirato has created a site-specific out of doors set up for one of many grand terraces at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. Headwind contains a sequence of blue windsocks that evoke a faculty of fish as they sway in unison with the breeze. The Portuguese phrase for windsock, biruta, can also be a slang time period for somebody who’s scatterbrained or simply swayed—this provides a layer of metaphorical that means to a piece involved with the connection between nature and people. “The positioning’s historical past and structure emphasise order and permanence,” Schirato says, “however my work embraces uncontrolled forces from the surroundings to form its presence, which brings a way of impermanence.” Schirato’s work is usually influenced by science; she has launched into analysis expeditions observing underwater life in locations like Antarctica and the Arctic, and whereas diving by means of flooded caves. Elena Goukassian

World’s Festivals: Visions of TomorrowThe Wolfsonian, Florida Worldwide College, till 1 March 2026The follow of holding World’s Festivals at common intervals in short-term, elaborate fairgrounds the place international locations exhibit their newest improvements could seem to be a quaint throwback to an earlier period, though Expo 2025, held in Osaka in Japan, simply closed in October. This exhibition, that includes almost 80 objects from the Wolfsonian’s everlasting assortment, focuses on eight World’s Festivals within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Paris in 1889 and Barcelona in 1929 to Montréal in 1967 and Spokane in 1974. By means of them, it chronicles the gala’s’ essential roles as each technological showcases and venues for projecting mushy energy.

The assembled souvenirs, newsreels, furnishings, images, design drawings and extra embody Arthur Waagen’s sculpture of two employees establishing the Eiffel Tower (centrepiece of the 1889 honest in Paris) and the RCA Victor TRK 12, one of many first client televisions within the US, which debuted on the 1939-40 World’s Honest in New York. Alongside the historic shows, the modern artist Marco Brambilla is exhibiting the brand new video set up After Utopia (2025), which makes use of pc graphics and synthetic intelligence to create futuristic landscapes impressed by previous World’s Festivals. B.S.